The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for facilitating mobile data communication, such as high speed data. The invention is specifically related to a new arrangement for assigning carrier tones to a plurality of antennas and a coding technique to provide reliable, high-speed wireless access to mobile users in macrocells.
As more and more people come to rely on wireless communication and as Internet usage becomes more popular as well, it becomes desirable to provide the ability for mobile wireless users to have multimedia access such as to the Internet. However, effective multi-media access requires a high-speed communication capability such as, for example, a bit rate of 1 to 2 Mbps.
It is currently known to provide a wireless data system with high bit rates over a short distance such as in a wireless LAN environment. A co-pending provisional U.S. patent application, entitled CLUSTERED OFDM WITH TRANSMITTER DIVERSITY AND CODING (U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/011,601, filed Mar. 8, 1996), describes a technique for providing such a high bit rate wireless LAN. In that technique an input data stream is encoded to allow for error/erasure correction in a receiver. Then, a multicarrier (or multitone) signal is formed. For multicarrier, the basic idea is to divide the transmitted bandwidth into many narrow subchannels that are transmitted in parallel. Each subchannel is then modulated at a very low rate to avoid significant intersymbol interference (ISI). The disclosed method employs Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) a multiplexing technique described in for example, "Data Transmission by Frequency-Division Multiplexing Using the Discrete Fourier Transform" by Weinstein et al., IEEE Trans. Commun. Technol. Vol. COM-19, No. 5, October 1971, pp. 628-634 and "Multicarrier Modulation for Data Transmission: An Idea Whose Time Has Come," by Bingham, IEEE Commun. Mag., Vol. 28, No. 5, May 1990, pp. 5-14. In the method disclosed in the provisional application groups of adjacent tones are clustered together and separate clusters are provided to different ones of a plurality of separate independent antennas. A single receive antenna is then used to demodulate the OFDM signal with conventional techniques.
A mobile data system has particular problems which limit the ability to provide high speed multi-media access. The main impairments encountered in a mobile radio environment are delay spread, doppler and path loss as represented by reduced received signal power. Delay spread refers to the fact that because the signal will experience a wireless path that will have different impacts on different frequencies it is likely that the entire signal will not be received at the receiver at the same instant in time. A delay will be introduced. The delay spread in the macrocellular environment could be as large as 40 .mu.sec which could limit the data rate to about 50 Kbaud if no measures are taken to counteract the resulting ISI. In the 2 GHz PCS bands the doppler rate could be as high as 200 Hz (i.e., a mobile unit moving at about 67 mph). Furthermore, the received signal power is inversely related to the data rate such that, for example, at a data rate of 1Mbaud (approximately 50 times that of a typical voice circuit) there is a shortfall of at least 15 dB in received power compared to cellular voice services and this creates a link budget problem. Thus, without any system modification the coverage and performance of such systems will be severely limited. In fact, in the present wireless systems that cover a wide area with mobile receivers, bit rates of 10 to 20 Kbps have been achieved. Therefore, it is desirable to adapt the wireless transmission systems to facilitate high-speed data communications.